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President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad to serve as U.S. ambassador to China, the transitional office confirmed Wednesday. The longest-serving governor in U.S. history, Branstad has extensive ties to China and a close friendship with the Chinese President Xi Jinping that goes back decades. His selection had been rumored for some time. Trump hinted that Branstad could be his representative in Beijing in a speech in Sioux City, Iowa, two days before the election. "I...

Ohio's Legislature has passed a bill that would ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is typically around six weeks after conception — before many women even realize they're pregnant. The bill is now sitting on the governor's desk. John Kasich has 10 days to veto the measure; otherwise, it becomes law, reports NPR's Jennifer Ludden. Jennifer notes that the bill does not include exceptions for rape or incest — the only exception would be if the life of the woman were in...

As Donald Trump continues to court controversy via Twitter, Fox News host Megyn Kelly tells Fresh Air 's Terry Gross that the president-elect "really does need to be aware of the power that he has when he releases these tweets." Kelly felt that power firsthand in August 2015, when she pressed the candidate about his derogatory comments about women during the first Republican primary debate. Trump responded with a Twitter attack , which was quickly followed up by a barrage of...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhx-KhycbBs On his darkest days as an infantryman during World War II, Russ Fay found comfort in the memory of a pheasant sandwich. Fay was fresh out of a Wisconsin high school when he was inducted into the Army in 1944 and boarded a troop train for basic training. En route to California, the train stopped in North Platte, Neb., where several women greeted the soldiers with baskets of sandwiches and bottles of cold milk. Fay devoured a pheasant sandwich with...

Time magazine has named President-elect Donald Trump as the 2016 Person of the Year, a title Trump called "a tremendous honor" in an interview on the Today show. Trump was selected from a shortlist that included prior winners Mark Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin, as well as first-time candidates the Flint water crisis whistleblowers and Beyoncé Knowles. Previous winners include Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II, groundbreaking scientists and groups or archetypes such as "the...

Tai Boxley needs a hysterectomy. The 34-year-old single mother has uterine prolapse, a condition that occurs when the muscles and ligaments supporting the uterus weaken, causing severe pain, bleeding and urine leakage. Boxley and her 13-year-old son have health insurance through her job as an administrative assistant in Tulsa, Okla. But the plan has a deductible of $5,000 apiece, and Boxley's doctor said he won't do the surgery until she prepays her share of the cost. His office estimates...

A magnitude 6.5 earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia around 5 a.m. local time on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 people. The death toll is expected to rise as rescue and recovery efforts continue, NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports. The quake was at a relatively shallow depth, just 11 miles under the Earth's surface, Anthony says. Its epicenter was on the coast of Aceh province, the same region where an earthquake triggered a devastating tsunami in 2004. No tsunami warning has been issued...

Editor's note: There is language in this piece that some will find offensive. Sometime in early 2016 between a Trump rally in New Hampshire, where a burly man shouted something at me about being Muslim, and a series of particularly vitriolic tweets that included some combination of "raghead," "terrorist," "bitch" and "jihadi," I went into my editor's office and wept. I cried for the first (but not the last) time this campaign season. Through tears, I told her that...

The last unfinished Senate race of the election is nearly over. State Treasurer John Neely Kennedy, a Republican, is the clear favorite to become the next Senator from Louisiana, despite an eleventh-hour fundraising surge from his Democratic opponent, Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell. Because of Louisiana's unusual " jungle primary " election laws, none of the 24 candidates vying to replace retiring Senator David Vitter won enough of the vote to win the seat outright on Nov. 8, so...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. DAVID GREENE, HOST: Here's a question people are still asking. What caused a deadly fire Friday night at a concert venue in Oakland, Calif.? No answer yet, but city leaders are releasing public records showing the city knew about potential hazards. The fire at a warehouse known as the Ghost Ship killed 36 people. Here's NPR's Richard Gonzales. RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: So far, 35 of the 36 bodies found amid the charred debris from...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: On this day, December 7, back in 1941, Japanese planes bombed Hawaii's Pearl Harbor. Seventy-five years later, a few survivors of that attack are still alive. Here's Wayne Yoshioka from Hawaii Public Radio. WAYNE YOSHIOKA, BYLINE: The USS Arizona memorial stands over the wreckage of the sunken Navy battle ship where 1,100 sailors have been entombed since December 7, 1941. Ninety-five-year-old Lou Conter is one of...

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. DAVID GREENE, HOST: OK, let's stay in Texas now, where after two decades of futility, the Dallas Cowboys are back on top of the NFL. And commentator Frank Deford says, love them or hate them, this is a good thing. FRANK DEFORD, BYLINE: Admit it. Even though you may despise the Dallas Cowboys with every fiber of your being, you're glad to see them back as a powerhouse, aren't you now? No, the Cowboys were never America's team any more...

In central Damascus, it's perfectly clear that President Bashar Assad is firmly in control. In the souks of the Old City, his face looks out of almost every shop window, pinned up next to gold jewelry or intricate rugs. No one has a bad word to say about him, at least not to a Western journalist. In rebel enclaves nearby, forces loyal to Assad are creeping back into control. After years of siege tactics, opposition forces in the suburbs of Damascus are increasingly making deals that see their...

Alex Jones has a following. His radio show is carried on more than 160 stations, and he has more than 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube. And he claims to have the ear of the next president of the United States. Jones is also one of the nation's leading promoters of conspiracy theories — some of which take on lives of their own. He has been a chief propagator of untrue and wild claims about a satanic sex trafficking ring run by one of Hillary Clinton's top advisers out of a pizzeria in...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrmMk1Myrxc Amazon says it is opening a new food and convenience store that doesn't have a checkout line. Instead, the company envisions customers at the Amazon Go store picking up whatever they want off the shelves — then simply walking out with it. The items are automatically billed to their Amazon accounts. Details about how the technology actually works are sparse. "We used computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion much like you'd find in...

We like to think our brains can make rational decisions — but maybe they can't. The way risks are presented can change the way we respond, says best-selling author Michael Lewis. In his new book, The Undoing Project, Lewis tells the story of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologists who made some surprising discoveries about the way people make decisions. Along the way, they also founded an entire branch of psychology called behavioral economics. Lewis is also the...

He was a flamboyant, alpha-male billionaire who said things no career politician ever would — someone who promised to use his business savvy to reform the system and bring back jobs. Voters believed that his great wealth insulated him from corruption, because he couldn't be bought. But his administration was marked by criminal investigations and crony capitalism. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was — until Donald Trump came along — the best known example of a certain type of wealthy...

In the quest to help the poor, it's difficult to know whose needs are the greatest. Without clear data, it's tough to know who to help first. The traditional way to look for the poorest of the poor is with household surveys . That's the primary source of data for policy decisions, but it has drawbacks. "Household surveys are expensive, and the coverage is not great," says Stefano Ermon , an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. So Ermon is heading up a new project to...

A federal judge has overturned a military panel's decision to force a Marine out of service for using his Yahoo account to send an email that included classified information warning his fellow Marines about a corrupt Afghan official. That warning was not taken seriously, as NPR's Quil Lawrence told our Newscast unit, and three Marines were killed shortly after. Later, "after some negative news coverage, the Marine Corps decided to force Jason Brezler out of the service for mishandling...

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube say they are creating a database to keep track of terrorist recruitment videos and other terror-related images that have been removed from their services. In a joint statement posted by Facebook on Monday, the company said: "Starting today, we commit to the creation of a shared industry database of 'hashes' — unique digital 'fingerprints' — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that we have removed from our services. ...